Back in February 2025, I wrote a post here in which I took issue with the trend among physicians of objecting to the use of the word “provider” for physician. Physicians object to that term because they find the “provider” terminology disrespectful and status-diminishing, but my claim was that the objection is itself just an expression of physicians’ narcissism, elitism, and political naivete. Like it or not, physicians are providers and have to get used to being described as team players in a joint enterprise rather than as solo practitioners engaged in some quasi-Romantic quest.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Health Care Series
DHS Is Systematically Lying to You
People sometimes claim to be unable to decide between the claims of, say, DHS and migrant defense activists. Faced with conflicting stories, people sometimes retreat into a kind of Pyrrhonian skepticism: each side is incompatible with the other, they’ll say, but neither side’s claims can easily be rejected. So we’re left with an undecidable clash of equal and opposite positions.
What to do? The original Pyrrhonian skeptics believed that tranquility was to be sought in the undecidable clash of such equal and opposite claims.* So they lived their lives–or tried to–without having any settled beliefs at all. If belief leads to conflict (they thought), non-belief eliminates it, producing the calm equanimity of the perpetually uncommitted. I sometimes wonder whether this is the guiding ethos of our news media and its modal consumer. If “mental health” means tranquility, and tranquility demands perpetual agnosticism, maybe it’s safer (people seem to be reasoning) to give equal credence to every claim, even if the resulting tranquility is purchased at the price of cognitive paralysis.
Continue readingThe Delaney Hall Scandal Revisited
Expert Insights and Journalistic Failures
Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with, and possibly sick of, my fixation over the sanitary condition of Delaney Hall. I’ve written four posts on the subject.
On June 24, I challenged New Jersey State Senator Holly Schepisi’s whitewash of the state health department’s report on Delaney Hall. On June 25, I took issue with Politico’s misreporting on the subject. On June 27, I took issue with NJ.com’s misreporting on the subject. And on July 2, I responded to Holly Schepisi’s incredibly stupid attempt to “respond” to my earlier challenge. Since then, I’ve demanded that all three of them–Schepisi, Politico, and NJ.com–retract or correct the false claims they’ve made on the subject. Schepisi has served up evasive bullshit; Politico and NJ.com have simply stonewalled and gone silent.
Continue readingHolly Schepisi “Responds”
And so do I
Here at long last is Senator Holly Schepisi’s “response” to my earlier post critiquing her claims about the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall:
Yeah. That’s really fucking stupid.
Continue readingGetting Delaney Hall Wrong
Re-visiting the May 28 NJDOH Health Inspection (x3)
The mainstream press is systematically misreporting the New Jersey Department of Health’s May 28 inspection of Delaney Hall. This is from an article in today’s NJ.com, “Federal judge demands answers after N.J is again blocked at Delaney Hall detention center“:
In a limited inspection last month, state Department of Health inspectors did not find any serious violations in Delaney Hall’s kitchen.
Yes, they did. The author links to an earlier article of his that quotes from more of the report and makes this same determination, but both articles fail to mention the Department of Health’s overall evaluation of the facility, and both fail to cite the statutory definition of this evaluation (both also fail to link to the report itself).
Continue readingDelaney Hall: Would They Lie to You?
Politico Gets It Wrong, GEO Group Evades Another Inspection
Here are a couple of footnotes on yesterday’s post critiquing Holly Schepisi’s views on Delaney Hall. I argued there that Schepisi had egregiously misrepresented the facts about the New Jersey Department of Health’s (NJDOH) May 28, 2026 inspection of Delaney Hall.
Fact-Checking Holly Schepisi (2)
How to Fail an Intellectual Health Inspection
I’ve recently taken issue with New Jersey State Senator Holly Schepisi’s claims about Delaney Hall regarding who initiated force there, but here’s a post on a different topic. On June 9th, Schepisi posted an item on her official Facebook page claiming that a May 28 inspection by the New Jersey Department of Health (NJDOH) had “proven false” migrants’ complaints about health conditions in Delaney Hall. This is her verbatim statement from the June 9 Facebook post, which she doubles-down on several times in the comments of the same post:
There have been so many conflicting comments made by NJ representatives regarding Delaney Hall but most of the claims of egregious living conditions made by Senator Andy Kim continue to be proven false. Here is the most recent example — if maggots were in food, if food was spoilt, the NJ Department of Health would not give Delaney a satisfactory health inspection.
To this end Schepisi cites a June 8 piece in Politico which links to the NJDOH report. The Politico piece summarizes the NJDOH report, and offers up some additional statements by Raynard E. Washington, New Jersey’s Commissioner of Health.
Continue readingAnother Night of Military Exercises Using Civilians as Human Shields
Not a joke headline. It happened the other day in Pasadena, California. It almost sounds like a comedy skit intended to unmask the hypocrisy of “Western” claims that Hamas uses “civilians as human shields.” We can’t, of course, be entirely sure of the military’s intentions here. The residents might not have been human shields; they might be simulated targets, after all. But that doesn’t really improve things.
Continue readingPASADENA, Calif. (KABC) — A late-night military training exercise in Pasadena startled residents as helicopters flew overhead and landed at a long-closed medical facility.
The exercise began around 8:30 p.m.Wednesday, with helicopters landing on the former St. Luke’s Medical Center building, which has been closed for more than 20 years. Residents said the noise continued into the early morning hours.
APPE/Felician Roundtable Cancelled
Apologies for the short notice, but unfortunately, the APPE/Felician University Roundtable on health care that I mentioned here on October 4th–originally scheduled for November 5–has been cancelled. Apparently, two of the panelists were forced to cancel, and it was decided by the organizers that new ones couldn’t be found on short notice. So incredibly enough, this is a non-ideological cancellation. Believe it or not, they happen.
Sisyphus Climbs Mt Aetna
Aetna, after telling the patient that her medical necessity claim for hypoxia has been denied without further appeal, that the appeals process is over, that they’re just not feeling the medical necessity involved, and that the unpaid balance of $10,000 is not their problem:
Policy of Truth 